By contributing writer Russell A. Graves
North of Dalhart there isn’t much to stop the wind. A vast prairie cleaves horizontally into an even bigger sky. If you get past the row crops and out to the big ranch country, you’ll find a wild land that has remained virtually unchanged. Short grasses carpet the prairie and yuccas point their green barbed leaves towards the heavens, waiting for rain to fall. While rains do fall intermittently, the band of Texas landscape that runs along the state’s long western edge gets barely over a foot of rain annually.
The semi-arid country sits below the foothills of the Rocky Mountain range to the west. Eons of sediment washed down from mountains to create the Great Plains and it’s the same mountains that influence the region’s weather. As clouds gather over the mountains, moisture is wrung from them. The result is a north to south running dry slot that encompasses about a quarter of the Texas landscape.
This patch of semi-arid ground is suited for many plant and animal species that are unique to this part of Texas. It’s a place where the density of people per square mile is scant and trees are perhaps as rare.
Prairie dogs, while not as plentiful as historical records indicate, are still numerous. Their incessant burrowing creates a habitat that supports numerous other high plains species like pronghorn antelope and a variety of reptiles and invertebrates. The prairie dogs themselves are a meal for animals higher up on the food chain.
As the sun rose across the immense prairie, my pal Chad and I were creeping through the shortgrass along a ranch road in his Ford F-250. Chad is an outfitter and a couple of months prior to the opening day of the pronghorn season, we were scouting for big males that his clients would invariably hunt. From our vantage point, emptiness was all around. East to west there was prairie, an old barbed wire fence immediately outside the passenger side door, the rutted ranch road on which we parked, a prairie dog town and more undulating prairie as far as we could see. Across the prairie dog colony – perhaps 400 yards away – we watch a small band of half dozen pronghorn antelopes skirt the town’s margins.
As we glassed the antelope, my binoculars began to wander as I watched prairie dogs skitter about the town. Running from burrow to burrow they weren’t as concerned with the pronghorns as we were. It was business as usually in dog town except for one thing: about one hundred yards from the truck I saw what I thought were baby coyotes.
“Look,” I told Chad. “Look at those coyotes!”
From a personal standpoint, I thought the find was significant as I’d never seen as many baby coyotes in one spot. When I put the binoculars to my eyes, I knew my snap identification was wrong. “Those are foxes,” I told Chad. “Swift foxes.” To read more pick up the September 2014 issue of North Texas Farm & Ranch.